Meet the Department Chair

Dr. Sarah Raynor graduated with a B.S. from Yale University and earned her PhD from MIT. She is this year's recipient of the College Board of Visitors' Academic Leadership Award. Her research interests include elliptic and dispersive partial differential equations.

Research Collaborations

Dr. Sarah Mason's research group was invited to spend two weeks at the Mathematical Sciences Research Institute (MSRI) in Berkeley, California through the Summer Research for Women in Mathematics Program. Her collaborators include faculty at CUNY, Lehigh, and Marshall. Their focus is on Macdonald polynomials, which are multivariable symmetric polynomials intersecting many different areas of mathematics including representation theory, combinatorics, and algebraic geometry.

Noncommutative Rings

Jiayi Li ('19), Kewen Peng ('19), Dr. Ferraro and Dr. Kirkman are investigating the degrees of the minimal generators of the set of elements invariant under a finite group of linear operators acting on a noncommutative ring. In 1916 Emmy Noether proved that the order of the group is an upper bound on these degrees when the group acts on the usual polynomial ring, and the WFU team has found examples where that bound does not hold for actions on noncommutative rings.

Measuring Gerrymandering

Dr. Steve Robinson and Dr. Jason Parsley are working with students Haochun Wang ('20), Jonathen Chen ('20), Andy Zheng ('20), and Hao Zhang ('20) to measure gerrymandering using notions of symmetry and calculus.

Modern Cryptography

In 2014, WFU undergraduates Bryant Davis and Rebecca Kotsonis did work on the Somos-5 sequence with Dr. Rouse. This work has applications in guaranteeing the security of internet transactions, including credit card number and email transmission. Today, he continues related work with undergraduate student Ke Liang ('18) and graduate student Michael Cerchia ('19).

A Farrell Hall study room enthusiast, Youyang Zhang has excelled as a Mathematical Business major at Wake Forest. After taking a statistics class, she realized that her love for business and her interest in math could be combined through this major. Zhang always had the Wake Forest School of Business…

Hunter Hale strikes most in and outside the classroom with his intelligence and math-focused brain. Whether in high-level statistics or economics courses, Hale has a uniqe passion for learning and understanding complex material. He came to Wake Forest because he wanted to go to a university that offered a statistics major and…

WORKSHOP: The Nexus of Climate Data, Insurance, and Adaptive Capacity: November 2018, Asheville, NC Societies depend on insurance to help recover from natural disasters, and also to help guide the development of resilient infrastructure and markets. However, decision makers in the insurance industry are faced with rising climate risks, which…

Teacher-Scholar Legacies: Richard Carmichael The statistician who has tracked passing attempts and rushing yards at Wake Forest University home football games since 1980 holds a Ph.D. in Mathematics. Richard Carmichael has taught courses on Linear Algebra and collaborated with mathematicians in Croatia, Poland, and India. His field of study is…

Senior Jack Garvey, orignially from Arlington, VA, is a Math Economics major with minors in both biology and health policy and administration. Garvey, initially coming to Wake Forest to be a doctor, made the decision to change courses as a result of one class he took. “I came in thinking…

Irina Viviano has skated through her four years on campus the same way she skates on the ice, with grace, composure and dedication. She has spent the majority of her Wake Forest career within the walls of the Manchester/Kirby building, studying hard, playing board games with friends and completing enough…